14 DAY TRIAL // Powerful spying malware infiltrated the personal laptop of the head of the German Federal Chancellery (GFC). The current GFC chief is Peter Altmaier, whose main role is to assist German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the affairs of the German state.
The infection was discovered in December 2014, and after further investigation, German officials came to the conclusion that it was the famous Regin backdoor, spyware linked many times in the past to NSA's spying activities.
Regin has ties to the NSA's infamous WARRIORPRIDE framework
According to documents revealed by Edward Snowden, the Regin backdoor, as it's detected by most antivirus solutions, is the Qwerty plugin in the NSA's WARRIORPRIDE surveillance framework.
Further investigation on this topic by Der Spiegel also revealed that WARRIORPRIDE is not used by the NSA exclusively, appearing to be shared with all the intelligence agencies part of Five Eyes (the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
Besides the Snowden revelations, Regin has also been tied to the US by security researchers, who observed a lot of similarities between Regin's source code and Stuxnet, another piece of malware concocted in the NSA labs.
Additionally, Regin also has numerous similarities to the hacking tools used by the Equation hacking group, linked last March by Kaspersky Lab to the NSA.
Not the first time the NSA targeted Angela Merkel
This most recent spyware infection is not the first time the US has been informally accused of spying on German statesmen. Back in 2013, the NSA faced a lot of criticism after illegally tapping into Angela Merkel's phone calls. The investigation was dropped by German officials in June due to a lack of evidence.
Following this most recent case, Germany's federal prosecutors started a new inquiry, and this time around they'll have something more solid to base their work on.